Maison Blanche, a two-story white marble pavilion with an arcaded lower story that was set on an artificial island at the end of a short canal; at the other end was a "hermitage" of rockwork rising from the center of a square water tank. Both the pavilion and the rockwork Parnasse de Gaillon contained grottos, the one natural, the other architectural. In 1566, when the Cardinal entertained Catherine de' Medici during the siege of Rouen at the height of the Wars of Religion, the Maison Blanche was the setting for a pastoral masque. The features were engraved by Jacques Androuet du Cerceau, whom William Howard Adams has suggested may have designed the ensemble (Adams 1969 p. 25-26, figs 17–18). Gaillon received a long succession of royal guests: Henri III and Henri IV, Louis XIV, and chancellor Séguier. Jacques-Nicolas Colbert, the son of Jean-Baptiste Colbert and Archbishop of Rouen, further embellished the château and its grounds with the work of Jules Hardouin-Mansart and André Le Nôtre. Gaillon was burned out in a violent fire in 1764, but reconstructed: here the Cardinal de la Rochefoucauld received Benjamin Franklin and Louis XVI as a Carthusian monastery until the Revolution. Vandalized and emptied in 1790, it was sold as a national property and partly dismantled, then served as a penitentiary 1812-1827 before being sold again to a local farmer in 1834, with the laconic remark "Ce domaine est des plus beaux de France." One section of Fra Giocondo's facade of Gaillon was removed under the direction of Alexandre Lenoir in the early nineteenth century for his Museum of French Monuments in Paris. Lenoir's collection of architectural remnants stood on land across the Seine from the Louvre, the very ground that the French government provided for the establishment of the École des Beaux-Arts around 1830. At the direction of architect Félix Duban the portal was integrated into the courtyard design and served as a model for students of architecture. Recently the elements of the Galerie des Cerfs and the Porte de Gênes have been restored to their original positions at Gaillon once again. The Château is distinctly battered in its present appearance. An idea of the refinement of its furnishing can be derived from the marble bas-relief of St, George and the Dragon, executed in 1508 for the high chapel by Michel Colombe, now at the Louvre Museum, Paris. Notes References William Howard Adams, 1969.